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NASA Again Delays Launch of Troubled Webb Telescope (nytimes.com)
In a blow to NASA's prestige and its budget, America's next great space telescope has been postponed again. From a report: NASA announced on Wednesday that the James Webb Space Telescope, once scheduled to be launched into orbit around the sun this fall, will take three more years and another billion dollars to complete. A report delivered to NASA by an independent review board estimated that the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion, and that it would not be ready to launch until March 30, 2021.
Duct-tape an AR-15 onto it, spray on a camo paint job, and call it a SPACE FORCE unmanned recon ship. Funding guaranteed!
(Of course that could have dire consequences, but doesn't everything these days?)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
... the cost of the troubled Webb telescope would now be $9.66 billion.
Getting close to the $13 billion cost of the latest US aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) and twice as much as the earlier Nimitz class aircraft carriers at $4.5 billion each. AND I imagine the flight-deck on the Webb will be*much* shorter.
I know they're apples and nuclear-powered oranges, but damn. The Hubble Space Telescope only cost $4.7 billion by the time it launched.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why don't they take my recommendation and build a space factory and use that to build the telescope? They could mine asteroids to get the raw material. That would save us from having to build it on Earth and deliver it to space. It would already be there! We could then reassign those factories to build other useful things.
A good rule of thumb for US (both federal and state) government projects it 3x the initial projected cost.
That's what happens when someone is spending other people's money. The power aspect is the only concern, money is power, they like power, so they spend like it's free.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It was only four months ago that they kicked JWST out to 2020. SLS got delayed to 2019 and is now being audited by the OIG; expect that report to be another shit show, followed by another delay to 2020.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
A good rule of thumb for US (both federal and state) government projects it 3x the initial projected cost.
The problem is that the JWST has gone WAY over the normal 3x threshold. Most internal budgeting goes by the 3x rule, so that is expected and planned for, since everybody knows how the "lowball-approve-jackup" game is played. But by grossly exceeding that threshold, JWST has become known as "the telescope that ate astronomy" since so much money has been diverted from other projects.
That's what happens when someone is spending other people's money.
This is what happens with cost-plus contracting instead of fixed price contracting.
Just for reference, the LHC only cost $6.4b.
This is what happens with cost-plus contracting instead of fixed price contracting.
This seems like a good idea but what you actually get is no company will sign such a big contract with so many risks. The threats to the company are simply too large. If something goes wrong -- something not always under the control of the contractor -- it can easily bankrupt the company when billions of dollars are on the line. Then NASA gets left with a half-completed project, a bankrupt company that can't finish it, and all the money spent up to that point was wasted.
What's really needed here is realistic estimates on what it will take to complete the project from whatever companies that bid on it. It should also include a rigorous non-partisan review of the bids to make sure someone isn't lowballing it hoping to get the contract and add fees on later.
What isn't this being done already? Politics. The only thing politicians care about is the money getting spent in their districts. They don't care if things like the JWST actually fly and do good science so there's zero incentive for them to be efficient. After all, it's not their money being spent, is it? It's ours. I've never met a politician who didn't think they could spend my money better than I could and that will probably never change.
Thank God SpaceX is starting to shake things up. Yes, SpaceX sucks off the government teat just like other "private" space companies but at least they're trying to innovate and do things differently.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It's not good news, however considering potential science return it's still worth. This telescope will have capability of taking spectras from exoplanets - potentially finding signatures for habitability or even life.
With regard to the cost, treading into unknown is inherent to any discovery, thus the costs are hard to predict, "we do it not because it's easy, but because it's hard". In my opinion unlimited fund is not OK, however little bit over the current cost is acceptable (even though so much over-budged) - nobody questions today the heritage of Hubble, or New Horizons, or Cassini, or Curiosity.
Perhaps the project just should be canned.
If not falling for the sunk cost fallacy, but completely disregarding how much we have already spent, will the now needed money (and realistically, multiply it by 3) buy us something that gives us more than if the money is spent on something else?
If the latter, axe the project.
And given how old and outdated this project already is, my inclination is to spend that money on new technology for new problems, not what was designed 15-11 years ago, and will still cost us more now than what was budgeted back then.
Ironically, James Webb was one of the non-nerd bureaucrats that ran NASA, coming from a background as heading the Bureau of Business for president Truman.
Part of the problem with NASAs cost is congressional mandates as pork barell to districts with the plants. Shelby comes to mind. If NASA were more independent of congress perhaps their engineers could exert more discipline on their suppliers and select based on best value?
Who came up with the idea of naming it after a bureaucrat who knew practically nothing about astronomy?
3x of original estimate? Are you kidding? The Hubble had original estimate of $400 million and it has costed $10 billion by 2010 and it is considered one of the most successful project based on cost benefit. It was supposed to be launched in 1983 but it was launched in 1990, however, the telescope had a fatal error which was fixed later in 1994.
JWST had estimate of $4.5 billion in 2005 and launch in 2011. Now estimate of $10 billion and launch in 2021. But this was expected. European Herschel telescope launched in 2009 had 3.5 m mirror and costed 1.4 billion. This has 6.1 meter mirror. Typically the cost of telescope goes as cube of mirror size so the cost of about 10 billion is expected.
It's being launched on an Ariane 5
The problem is, a lot of contracts ARE fixed price. However, if you know how it works, it's fixed price as long as whole list of conditions are met - if any of them are violated, the price starts rising.
This can include stuff like "the work will be done in XX state" and some politician wants it done in their state. So now the company tacks on the costs of moving the workforce over to the price of the bill.
I've written a few fixed price contracts - you cover as much ass as possible, so when the customer comes up and changes something, you soak them. This includes stuff like requirements as well, plus contingency and other amounts. We always warn them when something else they want causes a change request, as that adds to the cost they will have to pay.
Fixed price contracts are generally the rule, which is why everyone covers their ass because they know there will be changes, and those changes will add time and cost to the project so they get billed for.
And yes, you build in things like start/stop costs - if the customer causes a stop work for any reason (e.g., fail to deliver required deliverables on time, the stopping and starting of the project incurs costs that have to be recouped as well. Any time there's a "changing of the guard" all of a sudden can cause all this as the outgoing guy simply walks away and the incoming guy has to step in and pick everything up.
Cost Plus (or Time and Materials) isn't always more expensive than Fixed Price - careful contract writing ensures that Fixed Price contracts have sufficient bloat to factor in risk, as well as sufficient CYA to ensure if the user wants a change, they will pay for it.
Would you rather spend another 9 billion on a new one, or a billion finishing this one?
What makes you think we would be successful with some other technology if we can't be with this one?
I'm old enough to remember when the Hubble Space Telescope was an expensive boondoggle that would never produce valuable science. How did that turn out?
A product of NASA's "faster, better, cheaper" phase. With this announcement, it is now $9.16B over initial budget ($500M) and 14 years late. On top of which, unanticipated (in 1996) improvement in the the capabilities of (cheaper) large Earth based telescopes purportedly will largely obviate the need for the visible spectrum capability.
Is it worth finishing and launching this thing, for the IR capabilities? I suppose so. But I won't be heartbroken if "they" finally get fed up and cancel the project. Maybe they can mount whatever has actually been built on a pedestal as a monument to hubris. Or use it for an artificial fishing reef.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Got any documentation for either of those claims? From what I can see, President Dingbat has roughly the same management skills as Hillary Rodham Clinton. Pretty much none whatsoever.
Six major bankruptcies in his projects plus the Trump Shuttle which defaulted on its debts in 1990 but was dismembered by his bankers and sold without declaring bankruptcy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
before they find us????
You have to look at the big picture....:-)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It's not old, it's not outdated, and the sunk cost fallacy is inappropriate in this case. If the project is scrapped, NASA has a ten billion dollar paperweight sitting in a warehouse because you don't want the government to spend the equivalent of pocket change on a space telescope.
I understand the sunk cost fallacy angle.
But why do you assume it's old and outdated? If we got it into the air, it'd be humanity's best telescope. Even 15 years after it's initial design.
Would you rather spend another 9 billion on a new one, or a billion finishing this one?
This project has grown Too Big To Fail . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
I think SpaceX has got the reliability but why would they want that business? They seem to have a pretty full manifest and nobody's going to remember the JWST for the low launch cost. So worst case it blows up and SpaceX gets the blame for setting astronomy back a decade. Best case they get a few bucks and a passing grade. And it's trivial to spin as a "money is no object" launch where they just didn't care what was the most cost-effective option. I mean they got national security payloads and are in the process of becoming man-rated, they don't need any poster child missions. And to be cruel if someone else's rocket fails it could be a fatal blow to a higher priced competitor, like what are we really paying for. So if I was SpaceX I'd feign interest but make sure not to win the bid...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You clearly have no understanding of what this project is, what it actually means to "spend money" in a national economy, nor what the implications of what you are proposing are.
It's easy, isn't it, to make naive suggestions based on zero understanding of the actual project, issues involved, alternatives and budgetary projections?
Aside from easy, it's also very damaging to go around eroding trust in the amazing projects and opportunities that are being worked on so hard every day.
``OK, so ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking, yeah?''
The latest delay has caused been purely by T***p's insistence that a high-resolution Mexican spotter be added to the telescope.
This behemoth is sitting in a high bay at Northrop Grumman in Huntington Beach at the well known Space Park. Other contractors that worked on it let you tour and take pictures as it's a public funded item. NG has it in a secured facility and no pictures allowed. Delayed over and over again, it's not so much a NASA problem as a NG engineering debockle. They punish their support groups by demanding overnight calibration services as downtime is the devils work, using "work stoppage" and "deadlines" as justification because no one has the forethought to care if their equipment is calibrated or not. This is a "must not fail" project but they are not handling it as such, sadly.
Tweet, tweet, all id10t's out of the gene pool, open swim is over.
Duct-tape an AR-15 onto it, spray on a camo paint job, and call it a SPACE FORCE unmanned recon ship. Funding guaranteed!
The good news would be that a military JWST would be up and running in no time. The bad news is that it would now cost $100 billion.
PJ O'Rourke's favored paradigm would be a capitalist market in medicine. What we actually have is an interlocking cartel of medieval guilds which uses the force of law to operate healthcare as a monopoly.
My solution: work around the legal barriers by putting free-market healthcare for the general population on Indian reservations. Put medical buildings and dental centers right next to the casino, which everyone already knows how to find.
It's not old, it's not outdated, and the sunk cost fallacy is inappropriate in this case. If the project is scrapped, NASA has a ten billion dollar paperweight sitting in a warehouse because you don't want the government to spend the equivalent of pocket change on a space telescope.
Another billion dollar (and it's likely going to exceed that) is not pocket change. It's more than the original cost estimate for the entire mission.
For comparison, the New Horizons program cost around $700 million all in all. Dawn was around $500 million.
And new technologies not available at the time those missions were planned, and certainly not when JWT was planned, are available now, giving more bang for the buck.
This is a prime example of sunken cost fallacy, where people feel obliged to continue because of how much has already been put into the program, instead of looking only at how much we need to put in from now on, no matter how much was put into it in the past.
Our atmosphere is opaque to infrared. So any infrared astronomy has to be done from space. Hubble can only do partial infrared (specifically near-infrared), not the rest of the infrared spectrum.
Infrared is needed because it can peer through dust clouds. See this image of Eagle Nebula in visible vs. near infrared by Hubble to see the difference.
JWST works mainly in infrared, near and far. Moreover, it has much more aperture than Hubble (~ 2.4 meters vs 6.5 meters).
All this means that JWST can see back in time when the first stars that shined in the cosmos, and shed light on how the Big Bang progressed. Important stuff, and no instrument compares to its capabilities.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
SpaceX uses technology which has already been developed elsewhere. Therefore, they know what to expect. The Webb is new. Many parts of it have never existed before. Therefore, it is impossible to use other projects as a baseline for cost estimation.
Or use a public controlled system like any European country with cost half of the US, but better service quality and access to almost everyone.
The U.S. government wastes that on bridges to nowhere, Trump's golfing excursions and funding strip club excursions by the U.S. military.
So, yes, if they don't give a shit about those, then set billion is chump change.
Besides which, it's about the ROI . The military either offers no ROI, or a negative value depending on whether cleaning up the mess afterwards counts. The telescope has positive ROI, so the net cost is below the sticker price.
The U.S. subsidizes coal and oil to the tune of hundreds of billions a year. If you cut the subsidies, you could have a giant flotilla of Webb telescopes as an interferometer.
When you're willing to burn money on ego projects, you don't get to excuse not spending money on real stuff.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Go join a Gorean community if you can't handle a modern society.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You can't do infrared from Earth. There is no Earth-based telescope that can do it, nor will there ever be. You know this, so why create complaints you know are bogus?
If it's costing too much, it's because people demanded the lowest bid rather than the best bid and then demanded NASA have a smaller budget AND THEN kept changing NASA's directives.
Give it the money needed to do the job, then get the hell out of the way.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> There is no Earth-based telescope that can do it, nor will there ever be
That will be a great surprise to the many people with IR telescopes.
Use Google.
The telescope has positive ROI
Please explain. What exactly is our investment returning? What is the value of what it returns?
You can't export a commodity you don't have.